STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Given the season, no one should expect to hear birdsong anytime soon.

But no matter what the weather does, a lark — impersonated by a flute — will sing when the Musical Chairs Chamber Ensemble (MCCE) opens its seventh subscription season Jan. 29 in the Staten Island Museum.

The piece, “Song of the Lark” is the work of Charles Rochester Young. A professor of music at the University of Wisconsin today, Young was a graduate student when he wrote “Song of the Lark” in 1988, having been inspired by a Barbizon painting of a young field worker caught and enchanted suddenly by the melody.

It’s been widely played since and is well-represented on YouTube. The program also has a piece, “Aluta Continua” for flute, soprano and harp, by the group’s current composer-in-residence, Laura Kaminsky.

Kaminsky is an established composer and associate artistic director of Symphony Space.

She has proven to be a good fit for the group, according to founding flutist Tamara Keshecki. “When I looked through her catalogue,” she recalled, “I discovered that she writes all kinds of music that’s perfect for us, in the flute/piano/cello/voice variations.”

Twenty-four-year-old Island-based harpist Amanda Romano is featured in her third appearance with MCCE. Soprano Elizabeth McCullough and Lucy Corwin, viola/violin, will play as well.

The program has Debussy’s Trio for Flute, viola and harp; “Deux Interludes” of Jacques Ibert; Cantos del Tucuman of Alberto Ginastera, and the Suite No. 1 of Johann Sebastian Bach, a piece originally written for cello, now rearranged for flute, by Marie Claire Jamet.

FILLING YOUNG EARS

Since the beginning, MCCE has dedicated itself to the proposition that “concert” music can attract and keep new, young/youthful audiences.

Concerts are often held in informal settings. At the museum, listeners can sit at candle-lit tables with wine and dessert. Thanks to relentless fund-raising, seats aren’t expensive, at $15, $12 or $5 for students.

Ms. Kaminsky, who faces similar challenges at Symphony Space, says that new music is often a draw: “Including contemporary music on a chamber music program makes it more, rather than less accessible to younger listeners... music being made by composers today is more familiar to the average person, as composers now are speaking the language of our time and those sounds are in the air and in the ears of all of us.”

She also suspects that personal contact counts. “It helps to have the living composer there to talk about his/her music and creative process and sources of inspiration and compositional habits,” she said last week. “The dialogue with the composer makes him/her more real and human and therefore the whole experience becomes more engaging for audiences.”

Her own face-to-face with the MCCE audience will take place at the April 30 concert (at 7 p.m.) The group will play at Symphony Space on Feb. 21, and return to the museum on March 5. The late-spring concert (June 12) will be given at the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art.